With the advents of the printing press, typeset, typewriting machines, computer-implemented Word processing and mass data storage, the amount of information generated by mankind has risen dramatically and with an ever quickening pace. As a result there is a continuing and growing need to collect and store, identify, track, classify and catalogue, and link for retrieval and distribution this growing sea of information.
In many areas and industries, including the financial and legal sectors and areas of technology, for example, there are content and enhanced experience providers, such as The Thomson Reuters Corporation. Such providers identify, collect, analyze and process key data for use in generating content, such as law related reports, articles, etc., for consumption by professionals and others involved in the respective industries, e.g., lawyers. Providers in the various sectors and industries continually look for products and services to provide subscribers, clients and other customers and for ways to distinguish their firms over the competition. Such providers strive to create and provide enhance tools, including search and ranking tools, to enable clients to more efficiently and effectively process information and make informed decisions.
In particular, for example, legal professionals in the US and abroad are often involved in litigation, arbitration, mediation, administrative proceedings and other evidentiary processes wherein large amounts of information is collected. For instance, in a litigation there are often numerous depositions in which thousands and thousands of pages of recorded, videotaped, and transcribed testimony is collected. It is a constant need in the legal community to most efficiently and effectively track, edit, search and otherwise access and use such voluminous materials and information for use in providing legal services. For instance, an attorney preparing for trial often desires to prepare and outline for interrogating a witness. The attorney and/or paralegal typically pours through the deposition transcripts and videotapes associated not only with the witness being deposed but others to identify areas of questioning and past and potential responses. In addition to testimony, the attorney must consider and attempt to identify, collect and incorporate into the witness outline a vast collection of pleadings, documents, exhibits, etc., for planning and for fast and effective reference and possible display at and during trial. For instance, where an attorney is questioning a witness at trial it is a recognized need to be able to reference the past testimony of the witness and others to good effect and to quickly locate and present, such as by overhead projector, video screen, Elmo and other means, documents as exhibits to assist in the questioning and presentation of evidence to a jury or other fact-finder.
In addition, there is a need in the legal community to be able to quickly reference research, including case law, controlling or relevant to a particular issue that is the subject of questioning at trial or deposition or the subject of presentation, such as to an appellate court, administrative body, or otherwise. The legal professional is concerned with researching an ever-expanding body of legislation and judicial opinions and in tracking and associating such research to issues related to disputes to assist them understanding and resolving new or potential disputes. To facilitate this research, Information Service Provider (ISP) concerns, such as West Publishing Company of St. Paul, Minn. (a Thomson Reuters business), collect legal statutes, judicial opinions, law articles, and other legal and non-legal materials and make these available electronically over a computer network, e.g., the Westlaw® online research system. (Westlaw is a trademark of Thomson Reuters West.) At least one problem the present inventors recognized with this powerful system as well as other online research systems is that ISP's valuable functionality, while highly effective in researching and preparing legal documents, is not as readily available to a legal professional involved in real time activities, such as depositions and taking witnesses at trial.
West provides a service called LiveNote that provides to users: live feed of a transcript, audio and video directly on the attorney's or user's computer; streaming live transcript, audio and video feed off-site to remote participants; effective management of transcripts and related evidence in a case; performing sophisticated full-text searches across transcripts in a case to quickly retrieve critical testimony; highlight, annotate and analyze all transcripts; view hyperlinked exhibits; create dynamic reports on keywords, issues, annotations and exhibit lists that will automatically update as a case evolves; quickly prepare PowerPoint slides of transcript text synced with video to present at trial, hearings, or meetings; shared cases over a network so multiple team members can work simultaneously, or save a project locally and synchronize your work to the network case at a later time; control of a deposition or hearing, integrating innovative technology with realtime resources; and enables swift, efficient and secure online collaboration at various locations.
West LiveNote may also be used in an online fashion, e.g., LiveNote Web, to provide users additional access and functionality. Remote Access Server (RAS) is an additional online type service similar to LiveNote Web. Typically, LiveNote Web and RAS, as well as other such systems, allow users with subscriptions to login to a case over the World Wide Web. After logging in, users may download case information, including transcripts and documents, to their computers and work from a web-based or local application, such as West LiveNote.
The present inventors recognized a need to provide information consumers relational and event information about entities, such as companies, persons, cities, that are mentioned in electronic documents. For example, documents, such as news feeds, SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) filings or scientific articles, may indicate that Company A merged with Company B, that Lawyer C moved to Firm D, or that the interaction of protein E with protein F produces result G.
However, automatically discerning the relational and event information about these entities is difficult and time consuming even with state-of-the art computing equipment, because an event description can be found in a single sentence or spread out over a paragraph, a document or an entire collection of documents.